Baby Babble

I was in a shop the other day, dithering and trying desperately not to look like a shoplifter. (I sometimes get eyeballed by security staff and snooty shop assistants, who glare at me as if I am just about to palm a pair of sheepskin gloves). A woman came into the shop with a pram and proceeded to have a full-on, question and answer, adult ‘conversation’ with her baby.

“There’s no point buying a passport holder for Grandma, is there? She never goes anywhere.”

She said.

There was a constant stream of this one-way conversation and I glanced at the baby to see if it was actually awake.

The infant in question was about three months old and dressed all in white, with a white woolly hat and had a slightly perplexed look in its huge, round eyes. It was as if it were thinking; ‘You’re presenting me with a complex range of questions here, Mama.’   But the woman ‘chatted’ away with her baby, as if she were talking to another adult.

It reminded me of being advised to talk to your baby as much as possible (when my children were babies) to help bond with them and to advance their speech and development.

This was something that I struggled with, in the beginning. I’ve never been very good at small talk and I felt a little awkward and self-conscious talking to my baby, especially in front of other people. The chatty woman in the shop obviously had no such reservations and her child will probably grow up to be Prime Minister or a top human rights lawyer or something. (I found her a bit boring and kind of wished she’d shut up - but then, one way conversations can often be somewhat tedious to overhear)].

The way that I approached the issue, initially, was by reading to the children, as much as possible. (We are told that even tiny babies enjoy being read to - the soothing rhythm of the words, the fact that you are focusing on them, etc)

Reading felt far more natural to me than discussing the weather or talking about what we were having for dinner, a far better fit for me. I put a lot of effort into the reading; like my mother did when I was a child, I adopted different voices for the different characters in the stories. I sang the songs, making up tunes for unfamiliar songs, when all I had to go with was the words. The children loved it. I remember my older child’s response when I first read to her, when she was a baby. Her little face was so expressive and went through various stages of delight (it’s much harder to capture her attention these days!). She still enjoys being read to and it’s brilliant to see her learning to read, and reading to her younger sister.

I also sang to them - another thing reported to help the development of speech, and took them to baby music classes and rhyme-times at the library. The younger child begged me to stop singing once, ‘Stop, sto-op! She cried in a plaintive voice, so, tough crowd and all that (but she did learn to speak very early, the ungrateful little squirt!)

I should also mention that, after reading a childcare book that I found very helpful:

Secrets Of The Baby Whisperer: How to Calm, Connect and Communicate with your Baby – 2001, Melinda Blau and Tracy Hogg.

I kept up a light stream of ‘conversation’ where I detailed what I was doing - ‘Now I’m going to change your nappy’ etc. This was after the book had warned - ‘How would you like it if you were lying there and somebody just yanked your legs into the air, without warning?’ (Which is what you do with babies, when you change their nappy) So, after reading that, I used to say to the baby - Now I’m going to lift your legs, now I’m going to wipe you…’ A friend of my mum’s thought it was hilarious (and I dare say, ridiculous) but I still persisted. So, we learned together; me to communicate with my baby, my baby to form their own words. A bystander might have found my own monologues tedious to listen to but it was all to the good.

So, woman in shop, you keep asking your baby what s/he thinks of your Christmas present purchases, this time next year s/he will actually be able to answer you!

Buenas Noches, Fidel

The prostitutes waved at my boyfriend from the shoreline; this was a regular occurrence and he said that he’d never felt so popular.

I was young then and relatively slim and perky. Of course, as a female, I’d been subjected to years of cultural conditioning and been brainwashed into feeling not ‘good enough’, so I didn’t really appreciate my youth and perkiness, nevertheless, I didn’t feel threatened by the prostitutes. (I’m not saying that had I not been young and perky, my boyfriend would have gone off with one of the prostitutes, in fact I don’t know what I am saying actually. I just wanted to recount his quip about never feeling so popular!) We’d been warned about them; the ‘ladies of the night’, as the tour guide referred to them but they seemed good natured enough.

Cuba 1998. A tropical beach paradise - such as I’d only seen in T.V programmes and holiday adverts. White sand, palm trees, azure sea.

Rum and music - music everywhere you went - ‘Chan, Chan’, ‘Che Guevara’. People playing guitars - men and women, in every single place you went to. We were fans of Che Guevara; myself and the party that I was with; my boyfriend was reading a big, thick book about him. We were socialists and, although this was very much a holiday: cocktail-making classes, (I was drinking Mojito’s back in 1998, I’ll have you know) salsa classes, aquafit in the pool with a swim-up bar, we still wanted to see how communism-in-action played out.

What did we learn? That every household had a T.V and a refrigerator, as standard. That the grand, colonial buildings had mainly been converted into schools and municipal offices - there didn’t seem to be a government elite, living in luxury while the rest of the population lived in poverty. We learned that the Cuban National Health service was the second best in the world. (The general consensus is that Castro’s greatest achievements in Cuba were the health service and education https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/nov/27/fidel-castro-dead-revolutionary-history?CMP=fb_gu). The people that we met had aspirations, some of them wanted more; in some cases seemed a little frustrated but,on the whole, seemed happy (I do realise that we would have met a very small sector of the population and obviously I’m filtering all of this through my *Pinko-tinted glasses).

We learned that Castro’s Cuba was still holding its own amid a sea of hostility. A tour guide told us that after the collapse of the Soviet Union, China sent over a consignment of bicycles as a gesture of support and solidarity. She also told us that they (the Cubans) didn’t have a problem with the Americans, although the U.S didn’t seem to like them!

[*to steal someone else’s phrase]

I spoke to my aunt before we went away and she was incredulous. Obviously remembering the Cuban missile crisis and threat of nuclear meltdown; she cried; ‘Why on earth would you want to go to Cuba?!’

‘It is a Caribbean island.’ I reminded her.

The main holiday makers were Italians, Canadians and fellow Brits,. The T.V.s in our rooms transmitted VH1 (Canadian) rather than the American MTV.

We went on a two-day trip into the mountains, stopping off at Santiago for a show. I saw some short, bald, middle-aged  Italian men holding the hands of a couple of tall, beautiful Cuban women, in a hotel lift in Santiago.

So, to recap; Cuba - music, rum, music, equality, tourism and prostitution.

All photos courtesy of Pixabay - I can’t find my own!

Brown, Working Class

Indian Arms Workers Train in Britain- War Industry at Letchworth, Hertfordshire, England, UK, 1941

Wikimedia Commons

Racism; I was always aware of it, there was never a time when it didn’t happen. I don’t remember a specific fall from innocence or an isolated verbal assault, just the fact that it was always there.

“Your auntie spends loads of money going on holiday so she can go the same colour as you.”

My well-meaning, (white) mother used to say to me when I was little. I felt that she was missing the point somewhat but I couldn’t quite articulate this. I didn’t really feel it would cut it as a counter slur in the playground. I couldn’t say to the other kids - yeah, you’re calling me these names but my Auntie, who you’ve never met, pays loads of money to get a kick-ass ‘tan’ like mine! (She [my Mum] also told me to thump anyone who called me any names, which was quite an effective method, but didn't really offer a long-term solution!)

Years later, a horrible little shit at school told me that my skin was like coffee with loads and loads of milk poured in and I remember thinking - yeah, and that’s supposed to be an insult? It meant that I was a coffee-cream; my favourite chocolate in the box!

“Blackie” was their missile of choice, when I was a kid, and, misguided as this sounds, it had a rather innocuous ring to it, in comparison to the much harsher sounding ‘Paki’.

So, anyway, I knew that I wasn’t living in some all-encompassing, tolerant and lovely Utopia  but what I did assume, again misguidedly, was that things would improve when I was an adult.

And they kind of did, for me. In that I wasn’t subjected to daily abuse. But, as we see every wearisome day, things did not improve on a wider, global level.

I kind of assumed that the world would have moved on by the time I had kids and that people in general would be less racist. How naive of me. I now believe that history moves in a wheel rather than a progressive, upward slant. Every now and then the wheel dips into a shitty puddle. The far-right are on the move again and even a cursory glance at social media; yes, even at what (some of) my own virtual ‘friends’ post or share, shows that racism hasn’t abated.

When it came to class, as a perennial outsider, I never really felt truly ‘working class’, not because our economic circumstances indicated anything else, but because, as usual, it felt like a club I hadn’t been invited to. I look back into the nebulous past and see ‘working class’ as being a group of kids with their backs turned.

“No, you can’t join our gang.” They’re saying. “You don’t call your grandmother, ‘Nan’ and some of your cooking smells funny.”

In addition to this, one of the things I got bullied for, at secondary school, was my supposedly ‘posh’ accent! I don’t think I had much of an accent and perhaps that was the problem; Dad was Sri Lankan, Mum was from Wales and, I hypothesised, my accent was some kind of neutral in-between, I didn’t talk like a local. (Or maybe I got bullied for using words like ‘hypothesised’) This feeling of being outside of the working class seems particularly pertinent at the moment, when people are attributing Brexit and the election of (spits) Trump, to the fact that politicians have too long ignored the concerns of the ‘white, working class’. But, as some commentators are keen to point out https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/nov/17/trump-brexit-minorities-working-class; the working class is made up of all ethnicities. We/they have been there for years; working in the factories, driving the busses, nursing, cleaning, building, engineering etc, etc.

These days I feel more working class than I ever have; despite living in an area that a friend once referred to, scathingly, as a ‘bourgeois enclave’.

The people at the top will always seek to divide and rule, to harness any potential tensions between the different communities because they realise that, as a mass, the working class makes up the biggest proportion of people and are powerful and dangerous. http://www.peterloomassacre.org/shelley.html

So - 'the working class' - you didn’t invite me but I’ve joined anyway (in fact was always there, skating along beside you). Come, comrades, up the revolution!

What difference does it make?

The language of discrimination always seeks to dehumanise people; from politicians, describing people fleeing war zones as a ‘swarm’, to the impoverished sectors of society being dismissed as ‘Chavs’, words are used to lump people together as a mass and diminish them.

So it’s no surprise that when a film comes along which seeks to redress the balance - to show you the individual behind the incendiary headlines, it is met with resistance.

Palme d’Or winner  I, Daniel Blake, directed by  Ken Loach is such a film.

It tells the story of a man who has suffered a near fatal heart attack but fails to qualify for disability benefit, because,  although his doctor has said that he is not fit to work, he doesn’t meet the right criteria. The film follows him as he comes up against frustrating bureaucracy and a nonsensical system, whereby a person who is not fit for work has to be shown to be looking for work, to qualify for jobseeker’s allowance. He befriends a single mother, Katie (Hayley Squires), who is dealing with similar issues. (There was a point in the near past when single mothers were portrayed as public enemy No.1, in the right-wing press, before they moved their focus onto migrants).

The eponymous character, Daniel Blake, is played with great verve by stand up comic, Dave Johns. Hayley Squires is brilliant too, playing a proud parent who will sacrifice anything for her children.

I, Daniel Blake has a clear, some say polemical message.  But, perhaps with the plethora of ‘benefit scrounger stereotype’ programming that haunts the T.V schedules:

Benefit Street

Can't Pay? We'll Take It Away

On Benefits: : 30 Stone and Claiming (lazy, fat scrounger! - my parenthesis)

We need something to redress the balance and encourage empathy, rather than censure.

At the moment it seems as if the people who are the most vulnerable, have the least money and control over their destinies, are the ones most vilified in our society. A change in the system is needed, not charitable handouts. And the character of Daniel Blake is not looking for handouts.

Is I, Daniel Blake preaching to the converted? Will it predominantly be watched by bleeding-heart liberals like me or does it have more of a reach?

According to Wikepedia,The 1966 play Cathy Come Home, one of Ken Loach’s earliest works had the following Impact:

In the light of public reaction to the film, and following a publicity campaign led by Willam Shearman and Ian Macleod highlighting the plight of the homeless, the charity Crisis was formed the following year in 1967.
It also says:

However, Ken Loach has said that despite the public outcry following the play, it had little practical effect in reducing homelessness other than changing rules so that homeless fathers could stay with their wives and children in hostels.

Could I, Daniel Blake have a similar impact to Cathy Come Home? Could it raise awareness and bring about a change in the system? Opposition leader, Jeremy Corbyn has urged Teresa May to watch it. Some film critics are dismissing the film as unrealistic or as left-wing propaganda. Conversely, others are lauding it and saying that it’s impact is Dickensian or Orwellian.

I’d be interested to hear of any callous, self-centred Victorian having a road-to-Damascus conversion after reading Hard Times or Oliver Twist and becoming a philanthropist. (I also can’t help thinking of Oscar Wilde saying that you’d have to have a heart of stone to read of the death of Little Nell [The Old Curiosity Shop] and not laugh!)
However, I do remember my history teacher telling us that books like Jane Eyre and Nicholas Nickleby helped raise awareness of how dreadful the school system was and the need for educational reforms, so perhaps art/literature has always had the capacity to transform.

As for me, I came out of the auditorium in tears, after watching I, Daniel Blake (the ladies toilet at the cinema was crammed with women, discretely dabbing at their eyes). I was embarrassed by my tears - after all, I can afford to buy sanitary towels and don’t have to sacrifice my own dinner so that my children can eat.  I can also afford the £12.50 to see a film at the cinema and if you can too, I’d urge you to go and watch I, Daniel Blake. I also donated to a food bank the next day. This article has ideas for other ways people can help:

https://www.the-pool.com/news-views/opinion/2016/43/lynn-enright-frances-ryan-i-daniel-blake-how-to-help

The Changing room mirage

Changing room mirrors - they are the end, aren’t they? Can I hear a whoop, some foot stamping and some cheers? No? Sorry, I thought I was doing American stand-up, circa 1985 then...But changing rooms are notorious for their unflattering, unforgiving lighting, curtains that never quite fit the gap and a strange, life-sapping atmosphere. It’s a cliche (and gross exaggeration) that you come out of that cubicle wanting to slit your wrists.

However, I have recently become aware of a reverse phenomenon - the Flattering Changing Room experience. This is marketing genius, it fools you into thinking that you look fabulous and that everything you try on looks amazing, so much so that it is really hard to decide what to buy, because all of it looks so good. Until you get home….

Let me elaborate. I went shopping yesterday, having rushed out of the house in the morning with an hour to spare before I had to pick my daughter up from nursery. I wandered aimlessly around one shop, lamenting the fact that high necked, floral patterned blouses seem to be all the rage this year. The floral patterns in question look like the curtains from a Mr. Man book. (And a high-necked blouse is the natural enemy of the bigger-than-an-A-cup woman).

I then proceeded to one of my go-to shops, full of cheap clobber, grabbed an armful of stuff, went into a cubicle and something miraculous happened - I liked everything I tried on!

I had left the house that morning without make-up, which isn’t unusual but I do sometimes regret this when I go into a shop and my morale takes a nosedive. I hadn’t had time to dry my hair properly or style it in any way so it looked like a child’s drawing of some hair - all wiggly lines. But the lighting in that changing room must have had special filters because, in that cubicle, I felt good; my skin had the healthy glow of a shiny russet apple (not bad when you've been fighting off a cold all week) and my hair didn’t look shit. I tried on this smocky type thing and I liked it.

Usually I avoid those loose, smocky-type tops because they look like maternity wear but yesterday I felt kind of stylish in it. I bought that smock and some other voluminous thing and some pyjamas and I felt a surge of pure happiness, perhaps akin to what a drug addict feels when they take their first hit. (Maybe, I'm not trying to mock anyone for having a dependency)

The come-down came later on when, getting ready to go out, I put that smocky-type thing on. It didn't look loose and stylish and a little bit arty. It looked distinctly like Maternity Wear.

“Does this make me look pregnant?” I asked the old man.

“Er, do you want me to be honest?” He asked, warily.

“Yes.”

“Well, it’s not very shaped, is it? It doesn’t really do anything for you. We’ve all watched Gok Wan, we know that things should be shaped to be flattering.”

He was echoing what I had suspected and I lamented my own stupidity for wasting my money and buying into the illusion; that temporary illusion that purchasing something would somehow enhance my life. (Or make me feel better about myself) This, my friends - is Capitalism and I really should know better by now.

P.S I wore the top anyway. Perhaps I was being perverse, or maybe just trying to get my money's worth. Anyway, no one asked if I really ought to be drinking or when the happy day was, so I think I got away with it.

Food memories

They say that smell is the most evocative sense and, as taste is so closely entwined with smell, it obviously follows that food carries a wealth of memories and associations with it. I’m not going to talk about Proust and Madeleines; mainly because I’ve never read any Proust, (plus I really don’t think that anyone wants to hear about how the first taste of a pickled onion flavoured Monster Munch reminds me of being violently sick). But, as I was standing at the stove yesterday, waiting an interminable amount of time for some onions to caramelise, it made me think about how evocative cooking could be.

I’m hardly Mary Berry and I don’t do a vast amount of 'real' cooking but there are a few things in my culinary repertoire and I acknowledge that, if you put a bit of time and effort into cooking, it tastes better than processed food. And perhaps, for me, it is the act of making something, rather than the taste of it, that brings forth the volley of emotions.

So yesterday I trying to caramelise onions to make onion gravy and I have to admit that the only reason I was doing this was because we’d run out of gravy granules! As I stirred the onions and they stubbornly refused to resembled caramel, I remembered who it was who had taught me how to make onion gravy, a lovely lady called Val.

My first real job was working in public libraries and the manager of one of these libraries was a gloriously scatty, bohemian and generous-hearted woman called Val. It could be a little stressful sometimes, working with Val, because, lovely and gregarious as she was, she would often disappear for ages, leaving you to manage by yourself. But she was a real character and enormously hospitable. When we had events at the library; book groups, Christmas parties etc, instead of opening a packet of biscuits/crisps/mince pies, Val would produce a feast of epic proportions. There would be exotic salads, homemade quiches, a cheese board, pâté, French bread and grapes. The sherry and wine would flow and a good time would be had by all. Val was a fan of ‘real food’; of smelly cheese and fresh fruit and veg. It was she who suggested what I serve as a starter for my first dinner party (Pear with stilton and watercress on sourdough bread) and it was she who told me how to make onion gravy:

• Saute a chopped onion in butter or oil for fricking ages, until it’s lightly browned/caramelised (or you get bored out of your tiny mind and decide that as long as onions are see-through, they’ll do).
• Sprinkle a tablespoon of plain flour over the onion and cook for a minute.
• Add around a pint of stock (Val used beef stock, I use vegetable bouillon).
• Bring it to the boil then simmer until the whole thing thickens.

Note: if you use vegetable stock, as I do, your gravy won’t be brown - don’t worry about it.

Also, a nice little splosh of sherry or wine adds something special to the mix.

As many memories are often tinged with sadness, this one is too. Sadly, I learned that Val passed away this year. I hadn’t seen her for years but we always sent each other Christmas cards and she always remembered my birthday. The last card she sent me had a painting of two little girls on it and she said it made her think of me with my daughters.

So, Val, thanks for the recipes! I’m going to raise a glass of wine to you tonight.

Bad Feminist

I overheard my five year-old telling my husband that she wanted to have ‘no hair, like Mummy’, the other day.

“What do you mean? Mummy has got hair.” Her father replied, accurately enough.

“On my legs.” Daughter clarified. “I want to have no hair on my legs, like Mummy.” She pointed to the razor on the bathroom shelf.

I felt a pang of guilt.

I was horrified when I learned (from a feminist book, ironically enough - How to be a Woman by Caitlin Moran) that, these days, women were expected to get rid of all their pubic hair. Apparently the proliferation of Internet pornography, where pubes are eradicated to give the viewer a better view of the genitalia (not so sexy when described like that, eh, voyeurs?) had given men (bloody men!) the expectation of a bald pudenda. Thus it became fashionable to wax all the hair away. I was outraged; women were now expected to look like prepubescent girls (with tits)!

Tattoo Fixers is a T.V programme that I find oddly compelling, despite the fact that I don’t have any ‘ink’. It’s where the tattoo artists cover up bad, amateurish or lewd tattoos with pictures of skulls and flowers and stuff.  One episode featured a woman who wanted them to cover up the tattoo of a cat that she had on her vagina because she’d showed it to her colleagues on a drunken night out and now she was embarrassed!! (And you thought that your office parties were raucous!) We were watching this programme, me and my enlightened spouse and we both said - Yes, you could cover up that picture of a cat with a different, larger tattoo, or, how about this for a controversial idea - you could just let your pubic hair grow back.

However, as my daughter can attest, I’ve been shaving my legs for years, ever since I received my first ‘ladyshave’, at the tender age of twelve, to be exact. I never really questioned this, I just did it because all my friends did. In the same way that I sheepishly had my ears pierced and my hair permed, I just accepted this as something that you did. Pubic hair was supposed to be trimmed into a neat triangle, god forbid that any of it should obtrude from the leg of your swimsuit, but it wasn’t eradicated completely. Other cultures were roundly mocked for the female members not getting rid of their armpit hair. And Nena, of 99 Red Balloons fame (Google it, whippersnappers), was described (by an older, male friend of a friend) as a ‘dirty bitch’ for raising her arms on Top of the Pops and exposing the little furry guinea pigs residing in each pit. What can we conclude from this? That, not only is there (perceived to be) something unhygienic in not shaving your armpits but also something suggestive of promiscuity??

While my husband struggled to explain to the five year old, that it was Mummy’s choice to shave her legs but a result of cultural conditioning, throwing around words like patriarchy, and that she was too young to shave hers, I wondered what sort of a message I was sending her and her sister. Here I am, trying desperately to hold the tide back against the tsunami of pathetic, pink Princess nonsense, which threatens to engulf them at every turn but perhaps I am setting them a bad example. I buy subversive children’s books about strong, independent women who throw off society’s expectations and outwit or befriend dragons. I try not to talk about weight or associated issues with them and yet, and yet I still shave my legs. Does it really matter? Will it hold back the cause of equal rights and female emancipation if a middle-aged woman from West London persists in depilation??

Of course it won’t. Who cares about the minutiae. Similarly, if I choose to sport the odd bit of eyeliner, every now and again, I’m sure that the ghost of Mary Wollstonecraft won’t come back to haunt me.

However….am I being rather inconsistent with the whole bald leg thing?

I’m sure that other women don’t worry about this. Many women even shy away from the term 'feminist' as from an embarrassing label, akin to running around a department store shouting ‘I’ve just farted!’

“Oh no, I wouldn’t call myself a feminist.” They say, with distaste. Which I find utterly bizarre. Would they like to hand back the right to vote? To equal pay? Would they like it if custody of their children, automatically went to their husband, if they got divorced?....

I could go on, and on and on but I won’t.

Perhaps, now that Winter is Coming, I’ll stop shaving for a while and see what happens...

In the meantime, I’m going to go away and record a song called ‘Bad Feminist’, written to the tune of Michael Jackson’s ‘Smooth Criminal’. I’ll have to work at the lyrics. That will be the next post.